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There are many ways of testing if your website is up but here at StatusCake we believe in the power of real browser testing. So what exactly is real browser testing? Traditionally website monitoring services load your websites HTML content via a simple communication method (sometimes wget, sometimes CURL), they simply pull the HTML but do not render it. This means none of the images are loaded, no remote content is pulled in and the only thing you’re actually testing is whether your webserver can deliver some HTML in a reasonable speed. Without rendering the website monitoring isn’t testing what a real visitor to your site would see and feel but rather what a brainless crawler would.
This is where Real Browser Testing comes into play. Rather than using the simple text based communication methods to do our HTTP testing we use what is called a full stack – that is to say our advanced systems literally open up a browser window and navigate to the URL you are monitoring and then waits for the entire page contents to download. This means every image, every bit of CSS and every line of JavaScript, our test scripts act like a real person and see like a real person.
What advantage does this have? Well firstly you can be sure the speeds your seeing are not that just of your HTML but your entire page loading, so you’ll be able to tell if for some reason your site was loading slowly at a set time (say for example – a CDN that you use for images became slow), this ability to see real time speed implications allows you to understand if you need to add more resources to your server at certain times to improve visitor satisfaction.
Real Browser Testing also allows our robot to be wiser in detecting issues. When your page gets stuck loading due to an erroneous javascript redirect then we can alert you – and if your site is setting a cookie based redirect loop we can also let you know about that!
Real Browser Testing takes a little more bandwidth but offers a lot more in terms of data relevance – and for those times you don’t need Real Browser Testing you can simply switch it off! We offer the Real Browser Testing functionality in all our packages, from free all the way up to business so really you have no reason not to get most more relative uptime monitoring!
James Barnes
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